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Robot Odyssey

Robot Odyssey is wonderful puzzle-solving fun. The player tries to solve various tasks using three available robots that can be rewired. Each robot has four thrusters for moving, a grabbers for duh, grabbing, and a radio emitters for communicating with other robots. The wiring includes things like AND gates and flip flops. The system makes it easy to build simply things, and possible to build complicated things. Four wires and a flip flop are enough to get a robot bouncing back and forth across the room; with a lot more complexity, you can implement communication protocols using the radio.

In addition to being fun, the game is probably a great way to learn digital logic. Certainly it's how I learned digital lagic; the digital logic class I took certainly was easy after playing this thing. The game seems to have one big advantage over practicing with live circuits in a lab: the circuits in Robot Odyssey progress slowly, step by step, so you can see what is happening. In the lab, circuits tend to immediately do whatever they were doing, and it can be hard to see why a circuit does what it does.

Playing it Yourself

I highly recommend DroidQuest, a reimplementation of Robot Odyssey in Java. It does require Java 2, so not everyone can use it, but if you can, grab it.

Alternatively, you can download the Apple II version from the Internet plus an Apple emulator. This has the advantage of working everywhere (yes, the Apple II is more widely ported than Java :)), plus you'll get the exact graphic effects that the original game had, for whatever that is worth. (In fact, as of October 2001, Droid Quest is still missing several sound effects and graphical transitions.)

I don't know the legal implications of this, but morally, the Learning Company is no longer around, and the Apple II is no longer for sale, and it is practically impossible to purchase a copy of the original, nand so this doesn't seem too evil. ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/ has everything you need.

Other Web Sites

http://members.aol.com/Fractal101/odyssey.htm is a good Robot Odyssey site. It's also the only other one I know of.